The Madonnas of Echo Park Read Online Free Page A

customers were those who had neither. And my daughters, they are both lost to me, somewhere in the blinding California sunshine.
    What I thought I could not lose was my place in this country. How can you lose something that never belonged to you?
    â€œBienvenidos!
You are all welcome here,” announces David Tenant from the flatbed of his mushroom brown GMC pickup truck in the parking lot of the Do-It-Yourself Hardware store on Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park. He says this to the regulars, and to those who won’t be back because the work is too hard or the pay too small or they will have been deported or they will have moved on, to Salinas, San Diego, Phoenix. There are hundreds of parking lots in Los Angeles like this one, and thousands of men like me standing in them, waiting for a good day’s wages. That day doesn’t come around too often now because construction jobs are in short supply, but today, the first dry, chilly morning to break through a week of rain, Tenant’s looking for men, and if I’m lucky, I could make a hundred dollars for a ten-hour day.
    A restless crowd of thirty to forty men undulate around Tenant’s truck, our hunger for work an octupus’s tentacles swallowing the vehicle into our mass of bodies. The younger men, punching buttons on their ancient cell phones, swarm the front, while the grandfathers are hunched over in devotion or exhaustion in the rear. Tenant leaps up on a set of crates, raises his arms as a conductor readies his orchestra to begin a symphony, and cocks a boot atop the tailgate.
    â€œWho’s here to work?” he shouts.
    We raise our hands and yell, “Me,
señor
!”
    He scythes the air with his palms, casting a line in the direction he wants men from and pulling them from the crowd into the flatbed. The chosen men stride past us, hoisting themselves into the pickup in ascension. Any man who fakes being picked is tossed back into the sea; any man who refuses to leave the flatbed has to deal with Tenant’s son Adam, a squat, muscular former security guard and current aspiring actor who sits in the cab shouting into his cell phone until he’s needed. He’s been an extra in a number of horror films with Roman numerals in their titles and comes to help his father after the late-night shoots wired on meth and coming down on coffee, his thick biceps coated with what he says is real Hollywood movie blood.
    Men materialize in the parking lot as fast as they disappear into the back of Tenant’s truck. They come from a nearby alley, where they smoke weed and piss against the wall, or from the liquor store, fresh from checking their lottery numbers, or with forty-ouncers. Preachers have been here before to save us, but most of these men want the sermon that comes out of a bottle.
    Tenant waves his arms in front of himself with a magician’s swipe, his quota satisfied.
“No más!”
he shouts. “But we’ll be back.” The pickup jerks the dozen laughing and singing men in the back like bobble-head dolls as it speeds out of the parking lot and turns onto Sunset Boulevard.
    We are left with our bodies coiled, smoldering, cursing our luck, waiting for the next pickup truck to approach, which could be anywhere from a few minutes to several hours. It’s an erratic schedule better suited to a younger man, but when a boss like Tenant, who is in the business of supplying
trabajadores
to job sites throughout the city, says he’s coming back, it’s worth it to wait.
    When I started as
un trabajador,
the bosses could tell I’d never done any outdoor work. And knowing English on top of that? I was lucky to last a day. They liked men fresh from the border, not a forty-plus-year-old man who’d worked most of his life in a restaurant but whose opportunities for a living wage had vanished, undercut bybusboys pooled from the very men I now jostled alongside. They could mold these young
mojados,
push them